Chapters
3 and 6 of this book went into the issues of textbooks. There are many issues
that educators need to address. The first chapter was entitled “Why Textbooks
Aren’t Enough” and the second was entitled “How To Use A Textbook”. I will
focus more on the first chapter, since there wasn’t much to discuss regarding
math textbooks in the other chapter.
While
reading these chapters, I realized how much I neglected the true purpose of
textbooks. It was stated that textbooks were like encyclopedias. I never
realized how true this was. Textbooks are not meant to be read like a book.
They are meant to be considered for facts. “They are intentionally
‘content-overloaded’ with facts, dates, formulas, and taxonomies” (40) because
that is their true purpose. When we ask students to read a chapter of a
textbook for homework we wonder why they have such a hard time reading through
it. Imagine trying to read an encyclopedia yourself—I know that I wouldn’t want
to do that!
Textbook
publishers are now trying to make the textbooks easier to read. This doesn’t
come easily with the amount of information that they hold. “Reviewers
complained that the text was full of sidebars, boxes, and other presumably
eye-catching special features… which distracted from the content” (42). This is
a major issue. In trying to make the textbooks easier to read, they are
actually making it harder. These sidebars and eye-catching features confuse the
students more while trying to read their encyclopedias called textbooks.
One
of the most important ideas that I gathered from the text was that most
teachers, including my high school teachers of the past, only used one text to
give us information. “When we rely upon a single source for all of a course’s
content, we are teaching kids to accept one view, one authority; we are saying
that it is right to depend upon a single voice, even on complicated,
value-driven questions” (43). We need to teach students that there is more than
one way of doing things, and just because it is written in print, doesn’t mean
it is the best, or easiest way of doing things. I recall that in high school, I
was told that we wouldn’t be factoring the way that the book does because our
teacher had an easier way of doing it. My classmates and I didn’t question our
teacher at all. We had no problems with this because as long as it was easier
for us, we were in.
In
the next chapter that we read, the chapter focused on how we can effectively
use textbooks. The idea that I took away the most was that “you have to
prioritize; you have to decide to teach a few things well and fully—and let
some other stuff slide” (146). This is a major issue in the land of math. We
are constantly trying to get through the textbook, teaching students things
that aren’t necessarily important skills that they will need later. In doing
so, we negate to allow them to fully grasp what we are teaching them, thus assisting
them to never be able to retain the information later on. When you think about
it, did you really need to learn three different ways of factoring. Wouldn’t
one have been plenty?
Overall,
I believe that these chapters helped me to realize that I don’t need to use the
textbook for everything and I definitely don’t need the students to read the textbook
cover to cover. It is OK for me to skip over some topics (even though I will feel
uncomfortable in doing so), but it will be for the better good of my students.
Hopefully in doing these things, they will be able to retain information later
on and be able to see first hand when they will ever use that information again.
